When carrying out maintenance work on personal computers (PCs) or the like, there are cases where a maintenance technician adjusts the PCs for a client who holds a maintenance contract. To date, at the time of field service and maintenance work on the PCs, the maintenance technician temporarily stores, in an external storage device such as a universal serial bus (USB) memory, information that is stored in the PCs. Then, upon completing the maintenance work, the maintenance technician deletes the data stored in the storage device.
A variety of measures are being taken to block leakage of data in order to protect data in a storage device. Such measures include data encryption, setting a password on the data, and biometric authentication. According to a technique discussed in Japanese Laid-open Patent Publication No. 2010-287002, a user registers in advance in a physical server a location in which the user uses a storage medium such as a USB memory, and thus usage of the storage medium that is carried around among multiple locations is managed.
Such techniques are discussed, for example, in Japanese Laid-open Patent Publication No. 2010-287002.